Are you planning to take an insurance policy for yourself or for any of your family members from a corporate agent? If yes, then you should first need to check whether that agent is authorized to sell the insurance policy or not.

According to the Insurance and Regulatory Development Authority, also known as by its short name IRDA, there are approx 7000 corporate agents in the country and more than 4000 out of them have not applied for the renewal of their licenses after they got expired on 31st March 2010.

IRDA has cancelled the licenses and banned 4261 corporate agents who are selling Life Insurance and General Insurance policies as they did not renewed them after they expired on March 31, 2010. IRDA has issued a list of such agents who are not authorized to sell the insurance policies.

IRDA has also warned the Insurance companies to stop dealing with such agents and has also suggested the public to not take any type of insurance policy from those illegal persons. The authority has even issued the warning letters to the companies stating that if they would be found dealing with such fraud persons then their license can also be cancelled.

According to a senior officer of IRDA, the policies purchased after 31st March to till date can also be declared as invalid, but he further added that they are still thinking on this that whether or not they should take this step or not.

Is this step is taken then it will affect the business of almost all the companies dealing in Life and General Insurance. This also includes big names like HDFC Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Housing Development Finance Corporation and LIC because all these Corporate companies have such corporate agents with them who have not even applied for renewal of their licenses.